Visual Culture

Images and Interpretations

Norman Bryson

Publication Year: 2013

"We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past," declare the editors, who also coedited Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1990). The field of art history is not unique in finding itself challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Visual Culture assembles some of the foremost scholars of cultural studies and art history to explore new critical approaches to a history of representation seen as something different from a history of art.

Copyright

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

THIS anthology collects the work of fifteen lecturers who contributed
to a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer
Institute entitled "Theory and Interpretation in the Visual Arts,"
held at the University of Rochester during July and August I989. Lecturers,
organizers, participants, and visitors met daily for six weeks...

Introduction

THE academy is visibly changing. Other humanities have not
suffered as much as the history of art from institutional inertia.
Literary studies, for example, has welcomed the unsettling that
the expanded rhetoric of theory has generated. In his survey of the impact...

Feminism/Foucault—Surveillance/Sexuality

THE phrase, classing the body, invokes two related but distinct
meanings. The general usage of class is as a synonym
for group, set, or species. Processes of selection and comparison
produce categorizations or classifications. In the wake of the vast historical...

Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism

I WANT here to sketch some of the tangled relations between modernism
and sexual difference in the decade between I905 and I9I5.1
In art history, these were the formative years of the British avantgarde:
in I905 Augustus John was establishing his reputation, in I9IO...

The Discontinuous City: Picturing and the Discursive Field

THIS essay is concerned with orders of sense, regimes of visual
meaning, and the discursive formations and practices of power
in which they are constituted. It operates, therefore, at a particular
level of specificity and does so with some point. It sets out to...

Hieronymus Bosch and the "World Upside Down": The Case of The Garden of Earthly Delights

THE writing of art history is often regarded as if it were a self-evident
enterprise in which historians share common assumptions
and common goals. What matters, it is thought, are not the
theoretical assumptions and methodological procedures that animate...

Observations on Style and History in French Painting of the Male Nude, 1785–1794

WHEN might a drastic change in artistic style be a form of
continuity? A necessary corollary to this question is to ask
whether art-historical explanation requires at this moment a
reinvigorated capacity for stylistic analysis, but one that would not be...

The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet's Sleep of Endymion

AT one time art critics and historians aligned Girodet's remarkable
painting Endymion, effet de lune (The Sleep of Endymion),
painted in I79I and exhibited in the Salon of I793 (see Crow,
fig. I), with considerably later images-produced toward the end of the...

The Theater of Revolution: A New Interpretation of Jacques-Louis David's Tennis Court Oath

AS artistes manquees, as would-be artists, we art historians feel a
strong inclination toward the great unfinished projects. Here we
are not only entitled but asked to complete what was left fragmentary.
But especially in the case of works that never stood the test of...

Géricault and "Masculinity"

IN this paper, I bring together two distinct inquiries: the first, an
inquiry into some aspects of the cultural construction of masculinity;
and the second, an inquiry into certain works by the French
nineteenth-century painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). But first, I...

Strategies of Identification

IDENTITY and alterity are key concepts in the hottest discussions
in the humanities today. In the discipline of art history, "self"
and "other" are being reflected on in diverging approaches, from
historicism to gender studies. These concepts are hard to deal with...

Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image

IN this essay I will attempt to differentiate the gaze from the look,
and hence from masculinity. I will also provide a theoretical articulation
of the field of vision within which every subject is necessarily
held.1 Although the paradigm I will advance differs in many respects...

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture

THIS paper will explore some of the possible relations that can
be forged among the three terms in its title, that is, among feminism,
psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture. I propose
here at least one way those terms might productively be brought...

The Ecology of Images

AT least two urgent needs emerged from the war in the Gulf. First
of all, the United States Congress needs to sit down and draft a
constitutional amendment to ensure the separation of Press and
State. That action would probably require a much better Congress than...

Wölfflin and the Imagining of the Baroque

FOR many years, historians of art seemed to have little trouble
with the concept of the "baroque." Their confidence in using
this periodic category was in large part a result of the descriptive
power of Heinrich Wolfflin's influential text, Kunstgeschichtliche...

Dead Flesh, or the Smell of Painting

IN one of his paradoxical sketches (fig. I), Rembrandt represented
the central scene of the biblical story ofJudges 19, arguably the most
horrible story in the entire Hebrew Bible.! The sketch is a statement
about death, signified by the movement of the dead body. This paradox...

Form and Gender

THIS paper is a slight revision of a lecture written to serve the
fairly definite purpose of making the "archaeology of the discipline"
of art history, and, more specifically, the "critical history
of art" (as Michael Podro has called the foundational German tradition...

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